“I’ll try to get it right this time,”
Luca Pisaroni says of his upcoming production of Le nozze di Figaro. “It’s what keeps me going.” When I suggest to him that he is among the premiere Figaros in the world, he instantly scoffs at the idea—“No. I am not.” By his count, he has done over two hundred performances as Mozart’s Figaro. And that doesn’t include the seventy additional performances as Figaro’s nemesis, the Count. Standing well over six feet tall and wearing acetate-framed Windsor eyeglasses, he says to me in his affectionate and self-effacing demeanor, “this isn’t for a video, right? Because I apologize that my hair does not look so good.”
Born in Venezuela and raised in Busseto, Italy (the home of Giuseppe Verdi, Luca reminds me), Luca Pisaroni was an opera fan from an early age. “Instead of going to play soccer, I went to master classes,” he explains. The master classes he is referring to were those given by the legendary Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi who would come to the local conservatory regularly. “I was always fascinated by the process of teaching and learning. I absolutely loved it. I had the chance to in the Salzburg Festival in 2002 where he first worked with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, to whom Luca credits a great deal of his development as an artist.
